Tahoe is a macOS mis-step on par with Windows 8 or Windows Vista. If you’re from Apple and reading this, my feedback is pretty succinct: “I don’t recommend others upgrade. I wish I didn’t.”
Luckily for Apple, Windows 11 is not exactly in a position to attract switchers.
Let’s see if Apple can turn things around. iOS 8+ did improve on iOS 7’s worst bits.
One of the most annoying things after installing Tahoe for me, that for no good reason an ordinary app would randomly lose its focus. In the midst of my typing. This is unbelievably preposterous and I just can't stop hating Apple for this crap. How the fuck this is acceptable? I just have no words. What makes it even worse that I couldn't even complain about it on their support pages - they just keep removing my comments for being "non-constructive". This is some random bug, and many people have complained about it, how am I suppose to make it "more constructive"? Send them the exact configuration of constellations, the number of monitors I use and their positioning angles, log the keyboard rate and delay, the latency, the level of magnetic interference caused by my Bluetooth devices, etc.?
That is incidentally one of the many papercuts that are widely accepted in Windows, but never were a problem on a mac.
Don’t try to interact with a windows desktop while it is still booting up. Better to wait for everything to settle down, otherwise apps will constantly snatch away focus and your typing will go into random applications.
The support pages are not for you to contact Apple. They are there for users to help other users. The cynical person would say they are there to get unpaid labor from other users so Apple can spend less on support.
If you want to report something to Apple you use the "Feedback Assistant App"
My MacBook is corporate, and it's therefore loaded with a ton of corporate auto-update, VPN and apparently questionnaire software. Stuff pops up at the most annoying times. And sometimes, indeed it takes focus away from the thing I'm currently typing. Extremely annoying.
But apparently Apple is not the only offender. Just as I was typing this (on Harmonic on Android), a popup popped up, ate a few of the characters I typed and disappeared again. No idea what it said. Why do people do this? Don't hijack let applications I didn't ask for hijack my input.
I wonder whether this could be a touchpad malfunction, causing phantom clicks that move focus. To diagnose, you could temporarily disable it and use an external mouse.
Focus stealing has been an issue in windowed multi-tasking environments from the beginning. It's certainly been an issue in all macOS/OS X versions I've used since I started in 2011.
Dont get me started on the number of times Signal/formerly Skype opened up a dialog in-the-midst of me typing and me accidentally accepting a call because i happened to write 'space' at that moment in time
I looked into this and the issue is the inbuilt SecurityAgent briefly taking focus. For me I believe it’s related to some management setting our company has added not getting on with Tahoe.
Tahoe made at least one undocumented change to timer events in the GUI. This resulted in a difficult to debug problem in solvespace. I suspect we were doing something "wrong" and had to correct it, but the fact remains they made a change to how some GUI events work and didn't tell anyone.
> how am I suppose to make it "more constructive"?
Obviously by shutting the hell up, you ungrateful serf. The beatings will continue until morale improves.
Seriously, though, if you want this to stop, people like you are going to have to start voting with their wallets.
I finally pulled the plug on macOS a couple years ago for Linux, and I haven't been unhappy about it. However, I did make a point of buying a laptop that was well supported on Linux (a Lenovo X1 Carbon that was in the same price class as an equivalent Mac).
Random possibility - if you have Bartender installed, it's buggy as shit on Tahoe, and has some really weird stuff it does with hiding the cursor and otherwise changing the focus around. I haven't switched off yet because the alternatives don't anywhere near as much functionality, but I probably will at some point soon, because while the updates have made it somewhat better it's still a pretty terrible experience at times.
Oh decent timing, this happened to me first time today, I even looked down at the track pad to see if my hand was close enough to accidentally swipe it because I felt it wasn't
Do you have a logitech mouse? If so you need to reinstall the logi and/or G Hub apps. The cert changed and that's what's causing it to fail and keep grabbing focus away. Incredibly strange bug.
I had the same issue, and in my case it turned out it was caused by Logitech G Hub which was running in the background. I uninstalled it and did not experience the issue again. My suggestion is to check any background process that might be doing that.
I had this, it was our company's security software prompting an update (Admin by Request) that was getting hidden. An update to that software and the latest tahoe update seems to have resolved that issue.
> One of the most annoying things after installing Tahoe for me, that for no good reason an ordinary app would randomly lose its focus. In the midst of my typing.
I updated to iPadOS 26 on my iPad Pro, opened Safari, and tried to log into a website. For some reason the full-screen keyboard didn't load, all I could get was a miniature thing that floated on the left part of the screen (like the two-handed layout but with the full keyboard in one half, like typing on an iPhone 5s).
The memes about Steve Jobs turning in his grave are true. He would not have stood for slop like this for even a moment. Apple's quality game was miles higher back in the day.
Even if they tried to do some kind of Snow Leopard maintenance release for all of their products, I don't think they could raise the bar on quality high enough in just a single release. They'd have to do it a few times with nothing new to show for it.
This speaks nothing of the transition to MacOS looking more and more like a dysfunctional toy since Jony Ive left and Alan Dye took over.
I appreciate your frustration, but at the same time what is Apple supposed to do? If it's affecting only a tiny number of users, and you just happen to be an unlucky one, and they don't know how to reproduce it, and you can't help them reproduce it, then what? I think they just have to wait until somebody (such as yourself) is able to figure out with some kind of logging what is happening. E.g. the first question to answer is probably what actually gets the focus, if anything? To produce a bug report that at least suggests which area of code might be responsible.
I had a similar problem at one point, then finally figured out it was when I accidentally hit the fn button which triggered the emoji picker window and moved focus to it (IIRC), but it was off-screen because I'd previously used it on a secondary monitor. Reconnecting the monitor and moving the window back to my primary display fixed it. (Obviously, it's a bug to show a picker window outside of visible coordinates, and I think it got fixed eventually.)
But it also might not be Apple at all, if it's some third-party background utility with a bug. E.g. if that were happening to me, my first thought would be that it might be a Logitech bug or a Karabiner-Elements bug. Uninstalling any non-Apple background processes or utilities seems like a necessary first step.
> Luckily for Apple, Windows 11 is not exactly in a position to attract switchers.
Yes, but Linux is finally in that position, not to mention we're seeing silicon from intel and amd that can compete with the M series on mobile devices.
Linux isn't in position regarding display/UI. It doesn't handles HiDPI (e.g 4K) screen uniformly, leading to a lot of blurry apps depending on the display abstraction used (Wayland/X11) and compositor (GNOME, KDE, etc, all behave differently).
Let's not even talk about the case when you have monitors that have different DPI, something that is handled seamlessly by MacOS, unlike Linux where it feels like a d20 roll depending on your distro.
I expect most desktop MacOS users to have a HiDPI screen in 2026 (it's just...better), so going to Linux may feel like a serious downgrade, or at least a waste of time if you want to get every config "right". I wish it was differently, honestly - the rest of the OS is great, and the diversity between distros is refreshing.
Tahoe is uniquely bad in so many ways, so I tried the Asahi Fedora Remix with Gnome on my M2 Mac Mini. Aesthetically I was more attracted to Gnome, it feels like what we lost with Tahoe. Tahoe to me feels like a really chopped Android skin or something. I made it a few weeks on the Fedora Remix but ended up having to switch back to Mac over missing webcam drivers and other random hardware issues. Plus there’s little OS things that Mac does that make it really hard to go elsewhere.
I fell down the Nix hole this weekend, getting my corp Mac and my SteamOS Legion Go sharing a config. My corp device is a 5k iMac Pro that is going to be kicked off of the network when ARM-only Tahoe becomes mandatory later this year.
I work at Google, which issued a Gubuntu workstation by default when I joined. I exchanged it for a Mac, which I've spent a literal lifetime using, because I didn't wanna fall down a Linux tinkering hole trying to make Gubuntu feel like home. Every corp device I've had has been a Mac.
I'm reading this from a coffee shop. On my walk here, I was idly wondering if I should give Glinux (as its now called) a try when I'm forced to replace the iMac. SteamOS is making Linux my default environment in the same way Mac was for decades prior.
Windows has a much better chance, alongside WSL, even with all its warts than Linux.
GNU/Linux isn't sold in shops like macOS and Windows for regular consumers, until it goes out from DYI and online ordering, it will remain a niche desktop system.
In the Hacker News bubble, maybe. In the real world, not even close. The reasons why many a person chooses to use macOS, outside of the "YoU bUy It FoR ThE lOgO" that many hard-core technologists seem to believe, don't exist in any desktop environment.
Sometimes, people think "it can be made to look similar, therefore it's the same" (especially with regard to KDE), and no, just no.
Apple's worst release in years (maybe ever), Microsoft's worst release in years (maybe ever), meanwhile mainstream Linux UX has been taking baby steps forward on a nearly-daily basis for a decade straight.
Linux’s value proposition would have to be “Everything’s different learning curve yada yada but it’s so clean and well done users will see the light” Meanwhile run ps on an Ubuntu desktop. The same process bloat and shit that ruined Windows and macOS. Linux is a mess, almost by design.
Maybe you didn’t catch this yet, but Apple pulled their latest iOS 18.7.3 update and they seem to only promote iOS 26 now. They really want everyone off iOS 18 :/
> Still on iOS 18 and macOS 15 (Sequoia). I was a day one upgrader up until now, never had any regrets but this time things seemed very different.
I've tried and returned the iPhone 17 Pro. Love the hardware (especially the camera), but iOS 26 is inefficient (for lack of a better term), and the new camera UI hides too many things.
My phone updated on me and yesterday it took me 10 minutes to figure out how to listen to my voice mail. Like seriously, how do we go from clicking on the name calling to clicking on the name to see the voicemail left by that specific caller and no others
My HN comment history shows I've been worried about macOS for quite a while now, too. I'm a bit less optimistic than you, but I hope you're right. I'd really prefer to be wrong.
macOS has been an incredible productive OS for me since I was 15. I'm now 39. In the last few years is the first time in that period that I've seriously begun to wonder if it would be wise to get off the platform. I've already dropped iOS, watchOS (Garmins are actually amazing these days, for what it's worth), and iPadOS. I still use macOS daily along with tvOS when I happen to watch something, but the days seem numbered now. I'm pretty disappointed. I hope it turns around, but I'm slowly preparing myself to be on Linux primarily.
Upgrading to iOS 26 was a mistake. All the slow, distracting UI features that only makes the iPhone feel like some slow Android phone is really not an "upgrade" in any reasonable sense of the word.
Apple software has noticeably declined from my experience, both iOS and macOS. I find the lifecycle of Apple products to be offensively short, also.
If I buy a product and the hardware is good for 10 years (because I looked after it), I expect the software to also run just as well as when I purchased it - that is the case with Linux, why isn't it the case with macOS?
Every year the software upgrades invariably degrade system performance. Outrageous.
I personally hold Swift and SwiftUI responsible, as Apple has increasingly adopted them in its own products. Moreover, by introducing frameworks that are exclusive to Swift, the company effectively compels developers to use this rather mediocre language.
I have a fully functional iPad mini for my kids that only supports iOS 12. I can barely install or use any software though because it's not supported on such an old OS.
> I find the lifecycle of Apple products to be offensively short, also.
Apple is miles ahead of Android when it comes to phones and tablets, most in the Android ecosystem is e-waste four or five years in, while Apple stuff can still be re-sold for actual money at that time assuming you didn't bust your screen.
For laptops, Apple is so far ahead it can't even be described. Most Windows laptops physically break apart before macOS ceases to support any Apple laptop.
Only thing we can maybe talk about is desktop PCs ever since the switch to M that basically made meaningful upgrades impossible, but eh, in my attic there's a 2009 Mac Pro still chugging along as my homelab server + gaming rig.
I don't understand why Apple change things needlessly. What other purpose does it serve? How does this positively affect the bottom line? How does it improve life for Apple's users? Breaking basic interaction with windows purely because someone feels we should waste more screen real-estate on ornamentation by having bigger radius rounded corners is, for lack of a better word, stupid.
I'd like Apple to focus more on the things that actually matter to users. To fix bugs, to work on performance, to simplify things rather than complicate them. Focus on making it a better platform for doing work and less a playground for pointless fiddling with design and sloppiness.
Because if you don't make periodic cosmetic changes, people will think you're going out of business.
It's why your favorite shoe company, that you buy from every 2-3 years when you wear out your favorite shoes, always has new styles and discontinues other styles. Converse is a great example.
Good design should be timeless. For example, I like wat Leica did for their M serie cameras. At a certain point they decided that the design was done, and stopped messing around. For that you need leadership with good taste, because designers will always design.
> if the new intel processor can compete on battery life with mac I might go back to linux.
Unfortunately Intel is cutting down their Linux involvement so I wouldn't have high hopes for it. Newer AMD laptops are probably on par with Intel on Linux now.
Given the departure of Alan Dye and his replacement with someone (whose name I have temporarily forgotten) who comes from an actual UI design background, I am very optimistic that the next few iterations of macOS and iOS will actually start to improve the UI situation.
I still think Alan Dye was secretly fired. When you live in a bubble and everybody around you is propping you up, you think everything is fine and dandy, but users don't care about your or anybody's feelings.
Dye didn't bring something that users didn't know they needed, he brought chaos to the entire ecosystem, and he's the only Apple executive folks are willing to talk garbage about.
first time i used tahoe to help a friend w/ their laptop i legit thought it was like a knockoff macos or something, genuinely the ugliest macos version and even in the brief time that i've used it, i've encountered annoying bugs, QC at apple is dead lowkey
When the iOS 26 video player first leaked, I thought to myself, this has to be some kind of April 1st joke or a knock-off smear campaign or something. Nope, Apple did really half-assed their entire iOS to the ground.
When I read the welcome screen which includes the "hit features", all I remember was
"You can change your icons!" - What? Was that the big issue of my day? (Although, after I saw what they had done to them, it certainly loomed larger in my mind)
and
"Notification summaries that may be incorrect"
Miserable. Won't be upgrading the personal computer, am fast moving away from Apple as a whole, am telling others not to upgrade for as long as possible.
Can't you do a factory reset/recovery on Mac that lands on the version of macos shipped with the device? Then you could re-upgrade to the os you wanted, without trying it it seems Sequoia is still available in the app store
Yes, you can install any version of macOS that was ever supported for your Mac. (It’s been a long time since they used System Enablers.) I’m so frustrated with Tahoe that I’m about to do this.
It's also for a rather unbelievable reason --- if your GPU is not "powerful enough", you don't get rounded corners by default.
You read that right: apparently rounded corners are so resource-intensive that if you don't have or disable GPU acceleration, they'll disappear.
As much as I absolutely hate rounded corners in general, it's astonishing the apparent inefficiency with which MS have implemented them. Then again, mediocrity seems to be par for the course with their developers: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28743687
I agree. I have been kind of an Apple fanboy but the Tahoe thing is one of the worst products to come out of the company. I really think people should be fired for releasing this.
> Tahoe is a macOS mis-step on par with Windows 8 or Windows Vista.
Other than that weird resize thing written about here (which I didn't notice, thanks SizeUp for providing me with hotkeys remarkably similar to Windows) - why? Vista and 8 were immediately obvious changes in the UI, but in general it still looks and feels just like macOS has for well over a decade now.
New icons, new fonts, but... that's it?
Oh and HyperSwitch for some reason can't switch to Finder windows any more, but that's probably because HyperSwitch hasn't seen an upgrade in years...
Or iOS 8 and 9 did revert back a lot of iOS 7 changes.
I am not against changing UI, but it seems every time they are doing it they forgot all the lesson learned from previous attempt, and in such short period of time suggest they haven't learned anything.
Windows vista was a good OS. Windows 7 was vista with a new skin. People were just really dumb and didn’t realise vista needed new drivers and when 7 came out all the drivers were written so stuff worked and for some reason it made people think 7 was good and vista was bad.
I have maybe unpopular opinion, but Apple always been terrible in UX.
Just to give a few examples which annoys me the most:
- Finder. It just something else. After 10 years of using OSX I still can’t figure out how to use it efficiently for selecting the path - this experience is different every time, depending on the context where Finder was called from. I just don’t get.
- Lack of the true tiling window manager experience. Yes, there is Yabai, but it still suck due to the fact that you can’t have truly independent spaces each with individual layout and stack of windows.
- Infamous Magic Mouse’s charting port at the bottom.
I just wish I could have normal Linux natively on MB Pro.
Regarding the window manager and Finder; I had a better experience with the Windows equivalents way back on Windows 2k or even Windows 98 more than quarter century ago. Truly baffling.
I had to upgrade my iPhone to iOS 26 to setup my watch. I wish I had never done it. Nothing is where it's supposed to be from a UI perspective. Stuff breaks often. I can't use my contact search bar to search contacts. It only searches past calls. What the hell.
I don't like all the changes either, but I just opened the contacts app and started typing a name and it showed me exactly what I expected--several of my contacts with the name I typed. iOS 26.2.
I regret dearly the upgrade as well. I've turned a beautiful $3500 hardware into a close to Windows Vista machine that frustrates me daily. Just looking at it kills my productivity instantly, I just use full screen for all my apps now.
The M4 I bought last month shipped without Tahoe and hasn’t been updated. If you can get one which isn’t already upgraded, you can leave it on the better release as long as Sequoia was ever supported on that generation.
Off the top of my head: Windows Vista was slow and unstable on a lot of hardware of the time due to significantly higher system requirements than XP and a new display driver model that worked poorly at first, had a very polarizing look, and had quite overbearing UAC -- where XP would just let you do the thing, Vista would ask you three times if you're really really sure you wanted to authorize it.
It had decent bones though -- arguably a lot of its bad reputation was due to hardware/third party driver issues and people trying to run it on old hardware that just couldn't hack it. Windows 7 was well received and is basically the same thing with small improvements and some of the UX issues smoothed over (i.e. less annoying UAC)
Microsoft's Copilot AI software has been integrated in every corner of the operating system, from the start menu to the notepad to settings. Beyond the intrusiveness of it, it also does not work very well. Other AI mishaps include Recall, which takes screenshots of your desktop every so often, and the original version of Recall stored these in an unencrypted, insecure database.
On top of that, the OS feels more bloated and disorganized than ever, with something like six different UI frameworks all present in various spots on the OS; system settings are scattered across the Settings app (new) and various legacy panels like Control Panel and Network Connections.
What else... Microsoft now requires an online connection and Microsoft account to sign in to your PC; no more local-only accounts allowed.
I'm sure there's more I'm missing. It's not a pleasant operating system.
The Vista comparison is unfair. I think a lot of the bad rap Vista got was from trying to run it on underpowered hardware thanks to marketing XP-era machines as "Windows Vista Capable". I actually ran it on good HW (the kind that could run Crysis) and I didn't have anything bad to say.
Yes, UAC could be considered as annoyance by some but it's no different than "sudo" on single-user Linux machines and we seemingly have no problems with that (I wish we'd move on past that because it is damn annoying and offers no security benefit).
Comparing Vista to modern macOS is insulting. Vista didn't have that level of jank and the UIs were actually quite good, consistent and with reasonable information density, unlike "System Settings" or shitty Catalyst apps.
Windows 8 was when Microsoft tried to cater more towards Windows-on-tablet use cases. Which lead to everyone, including desktop users, having a fullscreen phone-style app menu take the place of the old start menu. This, for desktop use, is obviously quite disruptive and was hated by everyone.
They addressed most issues in the 8.1 update, like a year later I think.
MetroUI in Windows 8 was pretty universally panned. I thought it was pretty good on tablets and such, but it left a lot to be desired on desktops and hid a lot of functionality, it went too mobile for a lot of people's tastes.
Disclaimer: I was one of the dozens who used a windows phone. The Nokia Lumia 920 was great, you can fight me.
Windows 8 featured a notable paradigm shift from a menuing launcher (click start, programs, then the program you want, as an example), to a full screen launcher (Think Android and iOS). And also switched from floating windows (The default for most Linux distros and for Mac AFAIK) to rudimentary tiling windows (Think Android and iOS)
Vista had the right direction, Windows 7 merely continued on it and it became one of the best operating systems ever.
Windows 8 design wasn't bad per se, but they shipped the start screen when it lacks even the most basic features, so you'll return to legacy desktop the moment you want to do anything.
The most annoying part about it is they won't admit the obvious colossal mistake and fix it.
I've blocked Apple's update servers via /etc/hosts so this monstrous thing doesn't sneak onto my machine in the middle of the night, still happily on Sequoia.
Tahoe is a bit shit, yes. But I was there for both Vista and Windows 8 and they were both utterly unusable.
Vista ate every bit of RAM it could find, had severe driver issues and riddled with instabilities. It would not run on half the hardware at the time. I faintly remember a DX10 shitshow as well. And 8 hopelessly tried to apply Metro to the desktop and added a third (or was it forth?) settings panel. Also killed the Start menu.
Tahoe actually harms their hardware sales. I would normally upgrade to the latest MacBook Pro as soon as they become available, but I know that the next M5 generation will come with Tahoe installed and I intend to keep my current machine for as long as I can…
Unfortunately for Apple, Linux has not rotted the same way that macOS has. Will Linux win the desktop wars through attrition because it won't suffer the same enshittification as for-profit software?
If it wasn't for Apple Silicon and its stellar impact on battery life, I'd be gone. iOS 26 might make it happen anyway!
I'm as picky as the next guy, but I'm not seeing Tahoe being THAT BAD. I was holding off, but various events led to me buying a new laptop so I got it by default.
Resizing isn't great, but it's also deeply shitty in Win 11. I feel like window manager thought leadership has failed across the board, but the regression isn't that big of a deal in day to day usage, and is definitely not unique to Apple.
I switched from Windows 11 to macOS after a disastrous upgrade experience and drastic downgrade in performance on my Windows laptop.
I mean Windows 10 wasn't great but I got used to the taskbar searching the web somehow and the dual config menus everywhere and so on. But 11 was just terrible.
macOS has its pain points but man oh man what a disaster Windows is.
I have had Linux on my personal desktop and laptop forever so that hasn't been an issue, only used Windows for work.
> Tahoe is a macOS mis-step on par with Windows 8 or Windows Vista
Not even close.
It's taken a few steps in the wrong direction, but nothing compaered to the user-hostility of Win8 (attempting to move users from 'real Windows' into locked-down dumbed-down touch-centric mobile-like app store hell), let alone Win11 (creating an e-waste mountain, then pushing AI slop into everything)
Yeah, for me with a USB headset, the audio will go noisy about two minutes into a video / podcast. It clears up if I restart and doesn't happen when playing to the internal speakers.
I wonder if they'll show charts of how few people have upgraded in the same way they mocked Windows 10 adoption and Android versions a few years ago at the Keynote, to rapturous applause. I for one am staying on Sequoia as the OS looks like a children's toy on Tahoe.
I swear, this reign of visual artists as dictators has to stop.
I'm sure people noticed this issue internally and brought it up but some thing by some designer was seen as biblically sacred and overruled all reason.
I've been at companies were you get severely punished... sometimes fired for subordination for fixing an obviously broken spec by a designer emperor.
It's normal to be "I guess 2+2=5 here, whatever" as if the designer went in a tiny room, had a seance with the divine...
Yo, newsflash, everyone makes mistakes. Failure is when you force them to stay uncorrected.
Yea, the programmers aren’t to blame here. In fact some of the visual effects they have achieved are pretty cool. The designers are at fault because they prioritized visuals over usability. Literally nobody I know thinks “Liquid Glass” has been an improvement. The feedback is universally negative.
Yeah I don’t like the glass effect and I realised it’s because it creates movement and drags your attention to things that should be background items. On the phone, video controls and app folders are particularly egregious.
I've met some great designers as well. They usually come from more modest backgrounds.
It's kinda the rule for programmes too.
The ones that went to a small liberal arts school you've never heard of programming as their second career are usually more effective to work with then the Stanford/MIT crowd.
The problems start I think, when you have an expectation that your collaborators are somehow either superhuman or subhuman and not peers.
> I swear, this reign of visual artists as dictators has to stop.
> I'm sure people noticed this issue internally and brought it up but some thing by some designer was seen as biblically sacred and overruled all reason.
Funny how Apple went from Jony Ive sacrificing hardware usability for "beauty" (touch bars and butterfly switches) to Alan Dye mucking up macOS and iOS with Liquid glAss.
The Touch Bar implementation sucked but I'm going to defend that attempt 100 out of 100 times. If Apple didn't remove the function keys I think it would have been a hit feature. There wasn't proper commitment to the feature.
I worked for a company with a large website. The designers were elite and worked in a darkroom on expensive Apple equipment.
At some point, it turned out that users couldn't see a certain color on the website because it could be seen on an Apple monitor, but not on a mass-market laptop's TFT screen.
I have difficulty reading the light gray text on white/bright background that too many sites favor these days. I have a pretty good 4K 32 inch monitor. Even with a full Adobe color space capable and calibrated device in a darkroom I don't want to read that combination.
I don't get it, I have medically tested 120% color vision (it was a lengthy test), definitely nothing wrong on my side, so I don't understand at all what the designers and coders are seeing that they think that that is a great idea. The difference between the pixels is objectively bad, one can take a screenshot and look at the background versus text pixels.
I worked at a really large social media company, and there was a design which looked beautiful on all of the employee's high-res screens and monitors but used too much space and just didn't work for most of the users. It never got launched, which feels like what should have happened here.
In my experience,
part of the problem lies in visual artists not wanting to iterate the way software development does.
Sure, they might iterate on the design as they work on it,
but once they've found their final design,
they strongly resist changing it,
even as the actual development and testing of the software to implement it iterates and finds problems.
If they aren’t willing to try out their design and find issues with it, or be open to feedback from others, they’re incompetent.
Looking at the non-tech people in my life, exactly ONE had a positive initial reaction after installing ios 26. Do these people at apple not do “normal” user testing?
I want OS vendors to stop prioritizing "design" above performance. Opening a Finder window used to be instant, now it takes 0.3s-1s. Opening Safari used to be instant, now it takes seconds. Even menus in the menu bar take a few dozen milliseconds too long, which becomes obvious when you compare it to apps with custom truly-instant hamburger menus.
Computers are faster than ever, every task other than UI rendering is finished faster than ever, but these geniuses keep slowing down the UI with every update. It's criminal.
Seems like you could make the corners round (not making a judgement on that in any way) and still give the resize handle a more sensible size/shape/location right? As in this isn't a visual design problem.
It's tricky because you're now cropping into rectangular apps which may actually use all the pixels they get and want hit testing in them.
When Windows went to a 1 pixel border and shadow effects, it still had hit testing in a region around the window to account for that. No idea what they're doing with rounded corners in Win11.
I need evidence that sufficiently large organisations don't eventually devolve into… whatever that is. And then, names, so I can apply there, while there's still some work ethics left in me.
That’s not a bad thing (user experience is important) but remember that Liquid Glass was designed by someone without a UI background. Alan Dye designed the boxes iPhones come in and was installed by Jony Ive, an industrial designer. Neither of them had training or experience in usability, and all of the UX people I know are basically complaining non-stop about how many basic UX principles the 26 releases violate.
Wasn’t Jobs the one that set that dynamic up, where Ive was basically the #2 at Apple? It seemed to work as long as Jobs was there as the final quality filter.
>I'm sure people noticed this issue internally and brought it up but some thing by some designer was seen as biblically sacred and overruled all reason.
I disagree. Seems more like the group that implemented border radius at the OS UI implementation level did not work with the group that handles window sizing. Not everything is a conspiracy.
Of course it's not "a conspiracy", but it is a major, gigantic, huge, alarming failure by Apple. Resizing a window is just about the most basic and useful thing a window system can do after opening a window, and Apple totally messed it up. It's like they've never worked with a window before, but TBH though, their window system has always sucked.
I believe the heavy sarcasm is completely justified, I second it.
Most of the software creeping towards complete unusability devolve through non-practical apparence tweeking bullshit, ruining usability, while the functionality is intact (apart from bugfixes).
The other reason for decay is the overcomplication - pilin new and new marginal things on the top of the functionality heap - combined with sloppines, rushing through things, but that's an other discussion.
Did we reach a peek in software quality recently? So things only go down from here? I have this growing itchy feeling. I feel obstructed, forced to jump hoops, also disgust touching an increasing amount of software, most of those used for many many years without trouble (i.e. did not really registered its usage, it was doing things silently and well, but now starting to jump into my face or kick my legs).
It also - as seen in that screenshot, had large, always visible scrollbars where it was easy to see how far down you were in a folder or document, and could easily click and drag to scroll to where you needed. Now in the service of minimalism we have scrollbars that consist of a thin, semi-transparent line that fades out after half a second and is nearly impossible to click and drag due to how small it is.
The scrollbar thing is a more widespread mess. I've seen plenty of apps (cross platform) which hide the scrollbar as a tiny grey bar only visible when scrolling. Which on some TN panels is neigh invisible... If I can't see the scrollbar there is no additional stuff to read. I'm now pretty sure this is apple's bad design leaking though to the rest of the world.
> Now in the service of minimalism we have scrollbars that consist of a thin, semi-transparent line that fades out after half a second and is nearly impossible to click and drag due to how small it is.
You can make them always on still. I've done so ever since their disappearing act started. It's not even much hidden, it's in the "Appearance" setting pane.
Classic Macs were designed for the mouse or trackball. Modern Macs are designed for multitouch scrolling. When it's easy to get the scrolling infrastructure on demand, the desktop might not need the same click-first affordances.
If one chooses "Always" under the "Show scroll bars" option on the Appearance System Settings panel. They will be rewarded with thick*, always-on scroll bars that do not disappear.
> Now in the service of minimalism we have scrollbars that consist of a thin, semi-transparent line that fades out after half a second and is nearly impossible to click and drag due to how small it is.
This is endemic now. Cinnamon does it by default and I hate it. I only managed a partial fix, and then I had to do more work per-app (especially Firefox) to make them behave.
In the Aqua image the big bright blue scrollbars stand out far, far more than the content. That sucks, honestly. So does the percentage of the screen dedicated to their presence.
Also, horizontal scrollbars suck. One thing later versions of Finder did well was adjust columns to minimize the presence of them.
We just don't need UI that big anymore. These days our cursors are much more accurate, from the magical Mac trackpad to high DPI optical mice, and we're 40+ years into GUIs so the limited number of people who opt-in to a full computing experience can already be expected to know the basics.
Yes Tahoe sucks, but going back to Aqua or classic MacOS would also suck, just in a different direction. If you actually spend time using classic MacOS and Aqua these days, man is it frustrating to get basic things done. Everything is so slow and you're constantly resizing windows to see whats in them. I own several Macs from the 80s-00s and they are really in need of many quality of life updates that later MacOS revs added. On a modern Mac, enabling 'show scrollbars' gets you to a pretty optimal Finder experience, minus all the stupid Mac bugs and Tahoe nonsense like this article points out.
Hard disagree with all of this. I feel like I am constantly lamenting the simplicity and usability of old scrollbars and cursing their will o the wisp modern implementations.
Scrollbars used to be invisible to me. They only bubbled up to my consciousness when I needed them, and then there was no friction in their use. Now I am having to think about them constantly. To me that is 'standing out'.
Very much agree. Nostalgia is a hell of a drug. Not saying GP's opinion was pure nostalgia, but a lot of people certainly selectively remember only the good parts as they complain about the now.
I actually don't think there's anything wrong with horizontal scrollbars, as long as you're using an input device (like an Apple trackpad) that makes it equally easy to scroll either axis.
>Note that downside: you could only resize from that bottom right corner, not from any other edge!
This was one of the worst things about MacOS and why they lost me as a user early on. I used to be a Mac Sysadmin for 3 years, and the awful window system (and Finder) made it a living hell. I still don't find much to like about the GUI part of MacOS.
To be fair, this grip indicator only (and still) exists when the window has a status bar. It's part of the Windows status bar design, not of the window design. Of course, many more applications used to have status bars than they do now, so that's why you see it less often.
Better in that it was clear, but worse that you had to resize from the bottom right. Made expanding to the left, or up, very annoying. I'd take the current situation over this.
True, but not a 1:1 comparison, because Classic Mac OS windows were much better at staying where you put them, even between sessions. John Siracusa wrote a lot about how this was missing from Mac OS X: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2003/04/finder/
Great comment. I had forgotten how much better things were in terms of visual indicators. Slick looking design should never come at the expense of usability.
It was parctical (just like clearly visible scrollbars).
And my conviction is that computers are for practical and not the pretty things primarily. Can be pretty but not on the expense of usability. This last one is increasingly and sadly untrue nowadays!
Man, I love platinum. I know the internet favours Aqua by a wide margin (and fairly so, it is gorgeous), but something about platinum just feels right to me.
This post is very well presented and it highlights how absolutely bizarre the latest update was. The video demonstration was also very well done.
I remember a few years ago, people complained when Apple merely made the entire operating system uglier. (Something about a gradient on the battery?) A lot of people would talk hyperbolically ("apple KILLED macos!"), and that's indistinguishable to an outsider when an update like this brings other people out of the woodwork to say, "Hey, these changes are genuinely bizarre and absurd, what happened?"
That was a sensible chuckle indeed... but then it also made me realize that grabbing things IRL _moves_ them, not _resizes_ them. Nothing IRL really resizes.
So while it makes a lot of sense to grab inside the object to move it, IMO it actually makes less sense to grab _inside_ the object to resize it. (Imagine the reverse argument -- IRL you can actually grab the middle of the plate to move it, but if grabbing the middle of the window resized it, that would also be very bad.)
I've been trained to grab the edge to resize windows. So I wouldn't try to reach so far inside the rounded rectangle as OP, although it doesn't invalidate their entire argument.
It's funny. one of the most significant UI axioms I ever learned came from Bill Atkinson: "Always make the 'click zone' a little larger than the visual indication of the affordance." This becomes tricky or impossible for some things like touch-keypads, but for most things it makes the difference between frustrating and magical.
Apple seems to have forgotten its own innovations.
I suspect you must be very careful, overwhelmingly complete and understandable presenting this kind of stuff.
otherwise:
- if it isn't, the post might be buried in drama.
- or else, the post will be another obscure warning that nobody sees.
for me, I noticed after the ios 26 "upgrade" I must continually forget, then repair my bluetooth devices. But I don't have the benefit of a clearly understandable article that calls apple out.
What's jarring is not even that macOS Tahoe has such weird shapes of windows. What really astonishes me is that nobody seems to have anticipated how users would try to resize windows, and did not reshape the corner drag area (which I would expect to be a quarter-circle, or a quarter-ring along the rounded edge). This can't be a mistake, this can only be deliberate cutting corners by management in order to ship ASAP. And then nobody cared to issue an update.
Verily, the last UI redesign that was based on honest research and watching real users act was WinXP.
What feels plausible to me is changing the underlying 19x19 px control would break layout of many existing apps, and the design team was hell bent that window corners had to be that round. I’d say it’s simply form over function, and that likely a meta-level argument about user empowerment or whatnot won.
There's also the problem that not every window in Tahoe has the same corner radius. Some people thought this was laziness/lack of polish or a bug, but Alan Dye confirmed on a podcast that it was intentional.
So then they're left with a conundrum: do they adjust the 19x19 region on a per-window basis, depending on the per-window corner radius, or do they stick with one standard drag region? Probably it should be the former, but that comes with its own set of issues.
Exactly my point. It was too hard to make the grab box different. It was not too hard to pretend that the hyper-rounded corners would also make some layouts look and maybe act problematic. It was not too hard to splurge time and effort on liquid-glassing the entire UI toolkit.
In a word, it's hubris. It's not care about the user, it's not even care about market domination or setting a fashion trend; both have been flunked. It looks like somebody's ego needed an affirmation, or someone's grip on corporate power needed a demonstration. It's a bad, bad sign of a deadly corporate disease.
It’s not cutting corners. Apple does most of their testing using strictly internal resources, like secret “mini malls” in the Silicon Valley area. They fail because this testing biases their sampling; users must sign draconian NDAs to participate, among other things. These samples are effectively biased due to Apple’s corporate culture regarding secrecy and competition. So, Apple actually works very hard. It’s just they culturally prefer a lot of techniques that their competitors (e.g. Google and Facebook) have throughly proven as inferior.
But is Google better? Not really, they killed a lot of good products like Reader.
But is Facebook better? Not really, Cambridge Analytica and Metaverse and .. facebook products are disposable.
But I think these Apple UX bugs are misdiagnosed. Yes they are atrocious. But think about how atrocious and non-representative and non-competitive Apple’s testing population is.
This all is pretty curious! But my point is that every developer involved would notice how crazy the end result is. No need for a focus group to demonstrate that emperor's new clothes barely cover the body, and don't match the body parts.
But nobody from likely hundreds of people inside Apple involved in the project was able to effect a change towards sanity. I'm afraid many just didn't feel like speaking.
This feels like a surprisingly good moment for Linux desktops to position themselves as real alternatives and actually gain ground.
MacOS Tahoe has been heavily criticized for its UI decisions, especially Liquid Glass, which many people feel actively hurts usability rather than improving it. On the other side, Windows keeps piling on user-hostile features, dark patterns, and friction that increasingly frustrate power users and regular users alike.
Distributions like Ubuntu, Fedora, Mint, and others have mature desktops, solid performance, and fewer design decisions that get in the user’s way.
I honestly cannot remember another moment where both major desktop platforms were being questioned this openly at the same time. If Linux is ever going to take advantage of dissatisfaction at scale, this feels like it.
>This feels like a surprisingly good moment for Linux desktops to...actually gain ground.
I agree, and its likely that both macOS and Windows will continue to get worse.
That said, it's important to be realistic because users can and will put up with quite a lot of discomfort before switching, and this is because for every bad feature or misstep, there are 100 others that are so good you don't even notice them. And when you switch, you start noticing all those others features you never noticed before, because they are now gone. Some of these features will be hardware, some OS, some application support, and some of them you can fix and some you just have to get used to.
An approach I recommend is to add a linux laptop to the mix. You can buy a used, powerful laptop cheap, install Linux on it and try to use it for a time, keeping your other machines around. Chances are you'll find various trade-offs - Linux will NOT be a strict improvement, it will have downsides. Linux is particularly weak with power management and certain devices like fingerprint readers. Depending on the apps you use, it can be weak there, too. That said, Linux is very usable, easy to install, and you should try it. But I think it does people a disservice to imply its better on every axis. It's better on some, worse on others.
Well put. I dual booted because I still can't trust my CachyOS desktop not to do something surprising during important calls. But damn it is relieving to have full control again.
Linux desktops aren’t all immune to excessive minimalism and UI churn either. Just look at Gnome where they’ve decided it’s good in terms of usability to put all options in a hamburger menu and remove any sorts of sensible config options from the UI (a while back it was basic things like “show icons on the desktop”) to achieve this supposed sleekness.
Also Gnome disappeared after 2, got replaced with Unity in Ubuntu which was a whole new ugly thing, then that got replaced with Gnome3 which is very different from Gnome2, also Xorg got deprecated...
If you applied these standards of critique to Linux UIs, this post would be an entire encyclopedia, indexed by DE. I'd take even the worst modern Mac OS (Lion?) over that.
I feel like people who say this haven't seen KDE in a very long time. On a thinkpad it not only "just works", it works flawlessly, never demands attention without justification (i.e. no ads or superfluous items in notifications), every bit of hardware works, all the special keys, fingerprint reader and it's all recognized and usable and configurable from KDE.
Exactly, I was reading this on CachyOS Gnome. I was like, wait a minute, I've this exact same issue for years on Gnome (maybe on KDE as well, not sure).
Linux isn't there (on the desktop), and I doubt it'll ever be. It lacks so much: newbie support, drivers, easy configuration (user friendliness in general), and software. There's so much software that doesn't run on Linux. Linux also lacks mature frameworks that make development for macOS and .NET easy. The only thing desktop linux does well is browsing. That would be enough for most people, but they also have tablets and phones, and no need for a desktop.
This won't happen until Microsoft Word is available on Linux.
It's like the console wars — different camps say "our console is better, it has more teraflops." In reality, nobody cares about that — buyers will get the console that has the games.
Seriously, I think it depends if you're talking about business or home. For business, sure. For home—and this is quite relevant to the rest of your comment—I think it comes down more to gaming.
We're at the stage where almost any UI change no matter how small on Macs is heavily criticized. It seems a lot of people are getting very upset over a lot of micro detail. There's no way to please all of them. I've upgraded to Tahoe. Honestly, I barely notice any difference. It looks alright. There's very little for me to get upset over here. I'm pretty sure I'm in a bucket that describes the overwhelmingly large majority of users here: indifferent about the changes, overall not too upset, barely notice it.
As for Linux. I also have a Linux laptop with Gnome for light gaming (Manjaro). It's alright. But a bit of a mess from a ux point of view. Linux always was messy on that front. But it works reasonably well.
The point with the distributions that you mention is that they each do things slightly differently, and I would argue in ways that are mostly very superficial. Nobody seems to be able to agree on anything in the Linux world so all you get is a lot of opinionated takes on how stuff should behave and which side of the screen things should live. This package manager over that one.
I've been using Linux on and off for a few decades, so I mostly ignore all the window dressing and attempts to create the ultimate package manager UI, file managers and what not and just use the command line. These things come and go.
It seems many distros are mostly just exercises in creating some theme for Gnome or whatever and imitating whatever the creator liked (Windows 95, Beos, Early versions of OSX, CDE, etc.). There's a few decades of nostalgia to pick from here.
The changes in Tahoe do not fall under the bucket of "no matter how small". We have grown to accept many small, but very annoying changes, starting from disappearing scrollbars to not showing full URL in Safari, to name a few, which were all driven by smaller touchscreens on iPhone/iPad, but with Tahoe things became quite extreme.
Does anyone know if Stephen Lemay replacing Dye will potentially "save" the increasing mess that is OSX, at least UX wise, or is it more of a meaningless figurehead swap in a big org?
Tahoe is tragically bad by almost every UX measure, and following various Apple subreddits i wonder if they just don't care anymore - since the majority of people are shocked by the amateurishness of both bugs and design choices in the latest update - this comes on top of literally every major bug being ignored from the alpha to releasing anyway then continuing to ignore feedback.
I worked on Finder/TimeMachine/Spotlight/iOS at Apple from 2000-2007. I worked closely with Bas Ording, Stephen Lemay, Marcel van Os, Imran Chaudry, Don Lindsey and Greg Christie. I have no experience with any of the designers who arrived in the post-Steve era. During my time, Jony Ive didn't figure prominently in the UI design, although echoes of his industrial design appeared in various ways in the graphic design of the widgets. Kevin Tiene and Scott Forstall had more influence for better or worse, extreme skeumorphism for example.
The UX group would present work to Steve J. every Thursday and Steve quickly passed judgement often harshly and without a lot of feedback, leading to even longer meetings afterward to try and determine course corrections. Steve J. and Bas were on the same wavelength and a lot of what Bas would show had been worked on directly with Steve before hand. Other things would be presented for the first time, and Steve could be pretty harsh. Don, Greg, Scott, Kevin would push back and get abused, but they took the abuse and could make in-roads.
Here is my snapshot of Stephen from the time. He presented the UI ideas for the intial tabbed window interface in Safari. He had multiple design ideas and Steve dismissed them quickly and harshly. Me recollection was that Steve said something like No, next, worse, next, even worse, next, no. Why don't you come back next week with something better. Stephen didn't push back, say much, just went ok and that was that. I think Greg was the team manager at the time and pushed Steve for more input and maybe got some. This was my general observation of how Stephen was over 20 years ago.
I am skeptical and doubtful about Stephen's ability to make a change unless he is facilitated greatly by someone else or has somehow changed drastically. The fact that he has been on the team while the general opinion of Apple UX quality has degraded to the current point of the Tahoe disaster is telling. Several team members paid dearly in emotional abuse under Steve and decided to leave rather than deal with the environment post Steve's death. Stephen is a SJ-era original and should have been able to push hard against what many of us perceive as very poor decisons. He either agreed with those decisions, or did not, and choose to go with the flow and enjoy the benefits of working at Apple. This is fine I guess. Many people are just fine going with the flow and not rocking the boat. It may be even easier when you have Apple-level comp and benefits.
My opinon; unless Stephen gets a very strong push from other forces, I don't see that he has the will or fortitude to make the changes that he himself has approved in one way or another. Who will push him? Tim Cook, Craig Federighi, Eddy Cue, Phil Schiller? The perceived mess of Tahoe happened on the watch of all of these Apple leaders.
I’m asking you to judge people’s state of mind here, which is near impossible, but please bear with me…
> Several team members paid dearly in emotional abuse under Steve and decided to leave rather than deal with the environment post Steve's death.
Normally during an event like this there is a change in culture as well which I think we have seen under Cook. So why did they assume that the abusive situation would continue? Jobs was generally known to be harsh to the point of abusive, but if the situation did not change on his death maybe the abuse was equal parts cultural rather than just from the CEO, so why not leave earlier?
The mess of Tahoe didn't just happen on the watch of Tim Cook, Craig Federighi, Eddy Cue, Phil Schiller, it happened because of them.
Tim Cook has no taste and no sense of quality. He merely counts beans really well. Craig Federighi is responsible for the most precipitous drop in Apple's software quality since the late 80s and early 90s. Eddy Cue is responsible for some of Apple's worst software (music, iCloud, services), and Phil Schiller… what exactly does he do again?
He will prevent it from getting much worse than it would have under another decade of Dye, but I don't think he can totally reverse the trend.
I think this is just what happens to companies as they get older. Most of the people who pioneered the Human Interface Guidelines aren't at the company anymore, and management doesn't see much financial growth in Mac sales compared to AI and services.
Lemay's appointment was widely celebrated, but he'd been at apple since 1999 and never got the gig. My guess is that there are valid reasons for that that may not be design-related.
The old linux/X11 method of meta+dragging to move or resize windows from anywhere in the window, not having to hunt for the edges of the window, is so obviously superior to Windows and MacOS it's downright silly. They both should have swallowed their pride and implemented this 30 years ago.
Readit News
Luckily for Apple, Windows 11 is not exactly in a position to attract switchers.
Let’s see if Apple can turn things around. iOS 8+ did improve on iOS 7’s worst bits.
Don’t try to interact with a windows desktop while it is still booting up. Better to wait for everything to settle down, otherwise apps will constantly snatch away focus and your typing will go into random applications.
If you want to report something to Apple you use the "Feedback Assistant App"
There's a handy Python script here to show log which application is stealing focus: https://superuser.com/a/874314
If you find it's SecurityAgent then you might be hitting this bug: https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/807112
I suspect it's related to a JIT privilege management app my company uses.
But apparently Apple is not the only offender. Just as I was typing this (on Harmonic on Android), a popup popped up, ate a few of the characters I typed and disappeared again. No idea what it said. Why do people do this? Don't hijack let applications I didn't ask for hijack my input.
Here I've been thinking it's a hardware problem, like some sort of mechanical intermittent. Maybe not.
Especially annoying when every app is likely to have single-key shortcuts which end up being accidentally triggered.
Obviously by shutting the hell up, you ungrateful serf. The beatings will continue until morale improves.
Seriously, though, if you want this to stop, people like you are going to have to start voting with their wallets.
I finally pulled the plug on macOS a couple years ago for Linux, and I haven't been unhappy about it. However, I did make a point of buying a laptop that was well supported on Linux (a Lenovo X1 Carbon that was in the same price class as an equivalent Mac).
https://support.logi.com/hc/en-us/articles/37493733117847-Op...
You can run a python script to track the focused window every few seconds to identify what’s stealing focus.
So its not just me!
The memes about Steve Jobs turning in his grave are true. He would not have stood for slop like this for even a moment. Apple's quality game was miles higher back in the day.
Even if they tried to do some kind of Snow Leopard maintenance release for all of their products, I don't think they could raise the bar on quality high enough in just a single release. They'd have to do it a few times with nothing new to show for it.
This speaks nothing of the transition to MacOS looking more and more like a dysfunctional toy since Jony Ive left and Alan Dye took over.
Tiger and Snow Leopard were the peak.
I had a similar problem at one point, then finally figured out it was when I accidentally hit the fn button which triggered the emoji picker window and moved focus to it (IIRC), but it was off-screen because I'd previously used it on a secondary monitor. Reconnecting the monitor and moving the window back to my primary display fixed it. (Obviously, it's a bug to show a picker window outside of visible coordinates, and I think it got fixed eventually.)
But it also might not be Apple at all, if it's some third-party background utility with a bug. E.g. if that were happening to me, my first thought would be that it might be a Logitech bug or a Karabiner-Elements bug. Uninstalling any non-Apple background processes or utilities seems like a necessary first step.
Yes, but Linux is finally in that position, not to mention we're seeing silicon from intel and amd that can compete with the M series on mobile devices.
Let's not even talk about the case when you have monitors that have different DPI, something that is handled seamlessly by MacOS, unlike Linux where it feels like a d20 roll depending on your distro.
I expect most desktop MacOS users to have a HiDPI screen in 2026 (it's just...better), so going to Linux may feel like a serious downgrade, or at least a waste of time if you want to get every config "right". I wish it was differently, honestly - the rest of the OS is great, and the diversity between distros is refreshing.
Unfortunately today it is a race to the bottom.
I work at Google, which issued a Gubuntu workstation by default when I joined. I exchanged it for a Mac, which I've spent a literal lifetime using, because I didn't wanna fall down a Linux tinkering hole trying to make Gubuntu feel like home. Every corp device I've had has been a Mac.
I'm reading this from a coffee shop. On my walk here, I was idly wondering if I should give Glinux (as its now called) a try when I'm forced to replace the iMac. SteamOS is making Linux my default environment in the same way Mac was for decades prior.
GNU/Linux isn't sold in shops like macOS and Windows for regular consumers, until it goes out from DYI and online ordering, it will remain a niche desktop system.
Deleted Comment
I've heard that for almost 20 years now, but it never was.
Sometimes, people think "it can be made to look similar, therefore it's the same" (especially with regard to KDE), and no, just no.
[[citation needed]], benchmarks please, incl battery life, not promises. "We are seeing" implies reality
Most people want to get productive work done with their computer, and OS X has top tier apps for every need possible.
No good e-mail app, no good office apps, no good calendar app, no good invoicing app, no good photo editing app, no good designer app, etc
I'm not saying 2026 is the year, but...
Still on iOS 18 and macOS 15 (Sequoia). I was a day one upgrader up until now, never had any regrets but this time things seemed very different.
It's worrisome but all is not lost, I'll start sweating for real if next year's releases don't improve things substantially.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2026/01/07/hundreds-...
I've tried and returned the iPhone 17 Pro. Love the hardware (especially the camera), but iOS 26 is inefficient (for lack of a better term), and the new camera UI hides too many things.
macOS has been an incredible productive OS for me since I was 15. I'm now 39. In the last few years is the first time in that period that I've seriously begun to wonder if it would be wise to get off the platform. I've already dropped iOS, watchOS (Garmins are actually amazing these days, for what it's worth), and iPadOS. I still use macOS daily along with tvOS when I happen to watch something, but the days seem numbered now. I'm pretty disappointed. I hope it turns around, but I'm slowly preparing myself to be on Linux primarily.
I can't see a single reason to upgrade to Tahoe. We'll see what 2026 brings.
There was also a great boutique apps ecosystem.
Right now, it seems that macOS is going through its enshittification phase, sadly.
(Hold On for Dear Life)
If I buy a product and the hardware is good for 10 years (because I looked after it), I expect the software to also run just as well as when I purchased it - that is the case with Linux, why isn't it the case with macOS?
Every year the software upgrades invariably degrade system performance. Outrageous.
Apple is miles ahead of Android when it comes to phones and tablets, most in the Android ecosystem is e-waste four or five years in, while Apple stuff can still be re-sold for actual money at that time assuming you didn't bust your screen.
For laptops, Apple is so far ahead it can't even be described. Most Windows laptops physically break apart before macOS ceases to support any Apple laptop.
Only thing we can maybe talk about is desktop PCs ever since the switch to M that basically made meaningful upgrades impossible, but eh, in my attic there's a 2009 Mac Pro still chugging along as my homelab server + gaming rig.
I'd like Apple to focus more on the things that actually matter to users. To fix bugs, to work on performance, to simplify things rather than complicate them. Focus on making it a better platform for doing work and less a playground for pointless fiddling with design and sloppiness.
It's why your favorite shoe company, that you buy from every 2-3 years when you wear out your favorite shoes, always has new styles and discontinues other styles. Converse is a great example.
Features, people, FEATURES.
It's more effort to do things that also make sense than only to produce the bullet point.
I hoped the .1 or .2 would fix things, but I'm still seeing glitches and even random freezes.
Microsoft is a disaster right now, but if the new intel processor can compete on battery life with mac I might go back to linux.
Unfortunately Intel is cutting down their Linux involvement so I wouldn't have high hopes for it. Newer AMD laptops are probably on par with Intel on Linux now.
Dye didn't bring something that users didn't know they needed, he brought chaos to the entire ecosystem, and he's the only Apple executive folks are willing to talk garbage about.
"You can change your icons!" - What? Was that the big issue of my day? (Although, after I saw what they had done to them, it certainly loomed larger in my mind)
and
"Notification summaries that may be incorrect"
Miserable. Won't be upgrading the personal computer, am fast moving away from Apple as a whole, am telling others not to upgrade for as long as possible.
Can't you do a factory reset/recovery on Mac that lands on the version of macos shipped with the device? Then you could re-upgrade to the os you wanted, without trying it it seems Sequoia is still available in the app store
You read that right: apparently rounded corners are so resource-intensive that if you don't have or disable GPU acceleration, they'll disappear.
As much as I absolutely hate rounded corners in general, it's astonishing the apparent inefficiency with which MS have implemented them. Then again, mediocrity seems to be par for the course with their developers: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28743687
This is akin to MobileMe -
https://www.cultofmac.com/apple-history/steve-jobs-mobileme-...
Other than that weird resize thing written about here (which I didn't notice, thanks SizeUp for providing me with hotkeys remarkably similar to Windows) - why? Vista and 8 were immediately obvious changes in the UI, but in general it still looks and feels just like macOS has for well over a decade now.
New icons, new fonts, but... that's it?
Oh and HyperSwitch for some reason can't switch to Finder windows any more, but that's probably because HyperSwitch hasn't seen an upgrade in years...
Apple had a HIG and third party developers used it. Different apps looked consistent: toolbar, sidebar etc.
Apps had borders. If there was too much content there were big blue scrollbars.
Buttons had borders. Windows had texture. You could find stuff.
I could go on forever. But the OS was simultaneously better visible to the eye, and less visible to the mind. Stuff worked.
Or iOS 8 and 9 did revert back a lot of iOS 7 changes.
I am not against changing UI, but it seems every time they are doing it they forgot all the lesson learned from previous attempt, and in such short period of time suggest they haven't learned anything.
Just to give a few examples which annoys me the most:
- Finder. It just something else. After 10 years of using OSX I still can’t figure out how to use it efficiently for selecting the path - this experience is different every time, depending on the context where Finder was called from. I just don’t get.
- Lack of the true tiling window manager experience. Yes, there is Yabai, but it still suck due to the fact that you can’t have truly independent spaces each with individual layout and stack of windows.
- Infamous Magic Mouse’s charting port at the bottom.
I just wish I could have normal Linux natively on MB Pro.
Yes, because my apple hardware does not run properly with any other operating system. I would have switched to linux a while ago otherwise.
I guess Apple has realized that their hardware is so good that they don't have to worry about the software anymore.
I’m hoping they’ll wake up and fix this with the next release, but I’m not super optimistic.
We’ll see.
It had decent bones though -- arguably a lot of its bad reputation was due to hardware/third party driver issues and people trying to run it on old hardware that just couldn't hack it. Windows 7 was well received and is basically the same thing with small improvements and some of the UX issues smoothed over (i.e. less annoying UAC)
On top of that, the OS feels more bloated and disorganized than ever, with something like six different UI frameworks all present in various spots on the OS; system settings are scattered across the Settings app (new) and various legacy panels like Control Panel and Network Connections.
What else... Microsoft now requires an online connection and Microsoft account to sign in to your PC; no more local-only accounts allowed.
I'm sure there's more I'm missing. It's not a pleasant operating system.
Yes, UAC could be considered as annoyance by some but it's no different than "sudo" on single-user Linux machines and we seemingly have no problems with that (I wish we'd move on past that because it is damn annoying and offers no security benefit).
Comparing Vista to modern macOS is insulting. Vista didn't have that level of jank and the UIs were actually quite good, consistent and with reasonable information density, unlike "System Settings" or shitty Catalyst apps.
They addressed most issues in the 8.1 update, like a year later I think.
Getting to Windows 11 today, they have ads in the Start menu. Not exactly appealing to the Apple crowd…
Disclaimer: I was one of the dozens who used a windows phone. The Nokia Lumia 920 was great, you can fight me.
https://youtu.be/RuuqEZnvEoU?t=30
Windows 8 design wasn't bad per se, but they shipped the start screen when it lacks even the most basic features, so you'll return to legacy desktop the moment you want to do anything.
I don't think any of them are like Tahoe TBH.
I've blocked Apple's update servers via /etc/hosts so this monstrous thing doesn't sneak onto my machine in the middle of the night, still happily on Sequoia.
Vista ate every bit of RAM it could find, had severe driver issues and riddled with instabilities. It would not run on half the hardware at the time. I faintly remember a DX10 shitshow as well. And 8 hopelessly tried to apply Metro to the desktop and added a third (or was it forth?) settings panel. Also killed the Start menu.
If it wasn't for Apple Silicon and its stellar impact on battery life, I'd be gone. iOS 26 might make it happen anyway!
Resizing isn't great, but it's also deeply shitty in Win 11. I feel like window manager thought leadership has failed across the board, but the regression isn't that big of a deal in day to day usage, and is definitely not unique to Apple.
I mean Windows 10 wasn't great but I got used to the taskbar searching the web somehow and the dual config menus everywhere and so on. But 11 was just terrible.
macOS has its pain points but man oh man what a disaster Windows is.
I have had Linux on my personal desktop and laptop forever so that hasn't been an issue, only used Windows for work.
Not even close.
It's taken a few steps in the wrong direction, but nothing compaered to the user-hostility of Win8 (attempting to move users from 'real Windows' into locked-down dumbed-down touch-centric mobile-like app store hell), let alone Win11 (creating an e-waste mountain, then pushing AI slop into everything)
Are you just saying that because it has new glassy windows and is a resource hog? What is that different about Tahoe vs Sequoia?
- Apple Music requires one more click to pop the multiplayer, UI is worse and the click hitbox for the progress seek bar is too small
- Volume +/- now acts like a notification (top-right corner of screen and clickable). Horrible design decision (gets in the way of browser tabs)
- The "A > B > C" folder thingy at the bottom of Finder windows is gone, and the tabs' styling looks unsettling
- Weather (and Stocks, to a lesser degree) looks worse, lots of space wasted
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I'm sure people noticed this issue internally and brought it up but some thing by some designer was seen as biblically sacred and overruled all reason.
I've been at companies were you get severely punished... sometimes fired for subordination for fixing an obviously broken spec by a designer emperor.
It's normal to be "I guess 2+2=5 here, whatever" as if the designer went in a tiny room, had a seance with the divine...
Yo, newsflash, everyone makes mistakes. Failure is when you force them to stay uncorrected.
I bet designers aren't at fault here either because Liquid Glass violates at least three rules of design every second that passes.
https://www.vitsoe.com/us/about/good-design#good-design-is-i...
Instead OP mentioned "visual artists"; I agree. Liquid Glass is an art show; something that belongs in the realm of concept cars, not on the road.
It's kinda the rule for programmes too.
The ones that went to a small liberal arts school you've never heard of programming as their second career are usually more effective to work with then the Stanford/MIT crowd.
The problems start I think, when you have an expectation that your collaborators are somehow either superhuman or subhuman and not peers.
Humility and mutual respect gets things done.
> I'm sure people noticed this issue internally and brought it up but some thing by some designer was seen as biblically sacred and overruled all reason.
Funny how Apple went from Jony Ive sacrificing hardware usability for "beauty" (touch bars and butterfly switches) to Alan Dye mucking up macOS and iOS with Liquid glAss.
I don't get it, I have medically tested 120% color vision (it was a lengthy test), definitely nothing wrong on my side, so I don't understand at all what the designers and coders are seeing that they think that that is a great idea. The difference between the pixels is objectively bad, one can take a screenshot and look at the background versus text pixels.
You want your designers to have accurate color reproduction for obvious reasons, but they should be testing their work on shitty monitors, too.
It's a throwback to BDUF.
If they aren’t willing to try out their design and find issues with it, or be open to feedback from others, they’re incompetent.
Looking at the non-tech people in my life, exactly ONE had a positive initial reaction after installing ios 26. Do these people at apple not do “normal” user testing?
Computers are faster than ever, every task other than UI rendering is finished faster than ever, but these geniuses keep slowing down the UI with every update. It's criminal.
When Windows went to a 1 pixel border and shadow effects, it still had hit testing in a region around the window to account for that. No idea what they're doing with rounded corners in Win11.
The Expert (Short Comedy Sketch) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg
Visual artists and graphic/ux designers weren’t exactly claiming for Tahoe either.
Going off spec is not the correct way to deal with this, and I could see how that might get you in trouble. It's counter productive.
Better choice is to escalate, but at some point you have to simply disagree and commit.
I disagree. Seems more like the group that implemented border radius at the OS UI implementation level did not work with the group that handles window sizing. Not everything is a conspiracy.
Most of the software creeping towards complete unusability devolve through non-practical apparence tweeking bullshit, ruining usability, while the functionality is intact (apart from bugfixes).
The other reason for decay is the overcomplication - pilin new and new marginal things on the top of the functionality heap - combined with sloppines, rushing through things, but that's an other discussion.
Did we reach a peek in software quality recently? So things only go down from here? I have this growing itchy feeling. I feel obstructed, forced to jump hoops, also disgust touching an increasing amount of software, most of those used for many many years without trouble (i.e. did not really registered its usage, it was doing things silently and well, but now starting to jump into my face or kick my legs).
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https://guidebookgallery.org/pics/gui/system/managers/filema...
https://guidebookgallery.org/pics/gui/system/managers/filema...
You can make them always on still. I've done so ever since their disappearing act started. It's not even much hidden, it's in the "Appearance" setting pane.
Classic Macs were designed for the mouse or trackball. Modern Macs are designed for multitouch scrolling. When it's easy to get the scrolling infrastructure on demand, the desktop might not need the same click-first affordances.
*They're the same thickness as Aqua.
This is endemic now. Cinnamon does it by default and I hate it. I only managed a partial fix, and then I had to do more work per-app (especially Firefox) to make them behave.
Also, horizontal scrollbars suck. One thing later versions of Finder did well was adjust columns to minimize the presence of them.
We just don't need UI that big anymore. These days our cursors are much more accurate, from the magical Mac trackpad to high DPI optical mice, and we're 40+ years into GUIs so the limited number of people who opt-in to a full computing experience can already be expected to know the basics.
Yes Tahoe sucks, but going back to Aqua or classic MacOS would also suck, just in a different direction. If you actually spend time using classic MacOS and Aqua these days, man is it frustrating to get basic things done. Everything is so slow and you're constantly resizing windows to see whats in them. I own several Macs from the 80s-00s and they are really in need of many quality of life updates that later MacOS revs added. On a modern Mac, enabling 'show scrollbars' gets you to a pretty optimal Finder experience, minus all the stupid Mac bugs and Tahoe nonsense like this article points out.
Scrollbars used to be invisible to me. They only bubbled up to my consciousness when I needed them, and then there was no friction in their use. Now I am having to think about them constantly. To me that is 'standing out'.
I do think that was better overall, and it's something I miss about Snow Leopard, but I can see why they changed it.
This was one of the worst things about MacOS and why they lost me as a user early on. I used to be a Mac Sysadmin for 3 years, and the awful window system (and Finder) made it a living hell. I still don't find much to like about the GUI part of MacOS.
(and yes Lion was garbage, first upgrade I skipped since Tiger, and definitely the first "what the fuck are they doing").
It was parctical (just like clearly visible scrollbars).
And my conviction is that computers are for practical and not the pretty things primarily. Can be pretty but not on the expense of usability. This last one is increasingly and sadly untrue nowadays!
(P.S. scrollbars aren't even bad)
I remember a few years ago, people complained when Apple merely made the entire operating system uglier. (Something about a gradient on the battery?) A lot of people would talk hyperbolically ("apple KILLED macos!"), and that's indistinguishable to an outsider when an update like this brings other people out of the woodwork to say, "Hey, these changes are genuinely bizarre and absurd, what happened?"
So while it makes a lot of sense to grab inside the object to move it, IMO it actually makes less sense to grab _inside_ the object to resize it. (Imagine the reverse argument -- IRL you can actually grab the middle of the plate to move it, but if grabbing the middle of the window resized it, that would also be very bad.)
I've been trained to grab the edge to resize windows. So I wouldn't try to reach so far inside the rounded rectangle as OP, although it doesn't invalidate their entire argument.
Apple seems to have forgotten its own innovations.
I suspect you must be very careful, overwhelmingly complete and understandable presenting this kind of stuff.
otherwise:
- if it isn't, the post might be buried in drama.
- or else, the post will be another obscure warning that nobody sees.
for me, I noticed after the ios 26 "upgrade" I must continually forget, then repair my bluetooth devices. But I don't have the benefit of a clearly understandable article that calls apple out.
Verily, the last UI redesign that was based on honest research and watching real users act was WinXP.
So then they're left with a conundrum: do they adjust the 19x19 region on a per-window basis, depending on the per-window corner radius, or do they stick with one standard drag region? Probably it should be the former, but that comes with its own set of issues.
In a word, it's hubris. It's not care about the user, it's not even care about market domination or setting a fashion trend; both have been flunked. It looks like somebody's ego needed an affirmation, or someone's grip on corporate power needed a demonstration. It's a bad, bad sign of a deadly corporate disease.
But is Google better? Not really, they killed a lot of good products like Reader.
But is Facebook better? Not really, Cambridge Analytica and Metaverse and .. facebook products are disposable.
But I think these Apple UX bugs are misdiagnosed. Yes they are atrocious. But think about how atrocious and non-representative and non-competitive Apple’s testing population is.
But nobody from likely hundreds of people inside Apple involved in the project was able to effect a change towards sanity. I'm afraid many just didn't feel like speaking.
MacOS Tahoe has been heavily criticized for its UI decisions, especially Liquid Glass, which many people feel actively hurts usability rather than improving it. On the other side, Windows keeps piling on user-hostile features, dark patterns, and friction that increasingly frustrate power users and regular users alike.
Distributions like Ubuntu, Fedora, Mint, and others have mature desktops, solid performance, and fewer design decisions that get in the user’s way.
I honestly cannot remember another moment where both major desktop platforms were being questioned this openly at the same time. If Linux is ever going to take advantage of dissatisfaction at scale, this feels like it.
I agree, and its likely that both macOS and Windows will continue to get worse.
That said, it's important to be realistic because users can and will put up with quite a lot of discomfort before switching, and this is because for every bad feature or misstep, there are 100 others that are so good you don't even notice them. And when you switch, you start noticing all those others features you never noticed before, because they are now gone. Some of these features will be hardware, some OS, some application support, and some of them you can fix and some you just have to get used to.
An approach I recommend is to add a linux laptop to the mix. You can buy a used, powerful laptop cheap, install Linux on it and try to use it for a time, keeping your other machines around. Chances are you'll find various trade-offs - Linux will NOT be a strict improvement, it will have downsides. Linux is particularly weak with power management and certain devices like fingerprint readers. Depending on the apps you use, it can be weak there, too. That said, Linux is very usable, easy to install, and you should try it. But I think it does people a disservice to imply its better on every axis. It's better on some, worse on others.
All of these are longshots, but it really feels like we've hit a historic level of discontent.
Really? And windows does?
It's like the console wars — different camps say "our console is better, it has more teraflops." In reality, nobody cares about that — buyers will get the console that has the games.
Seriously, I think it depends if you're talking about business or home. For business, sure. For home—and this is quite relevant to the rest of your comment—I think it comes down more to gaming.
As for Linux. I also have a Linux laptop with Gnome for light gaming (Manjaro). It's alright. But a bit of a mess from a ux point of view. Linux always was messy on that front. But it works reasonably well.
The point with the distributions that you mention is that they each do things slightly differently, and I would argue in ways that are mostly very superficial. Nobody seems to be able to agree on anything in the Linux world so all you get is a lot of opinionated takes on how stuff should behave and which side of the screen things should live. This package manager over that one.
I've been using Linux on and off for a few decades, so I mostly ignore all the window dressing and attempts to create the ultimate package manager UI, file managers and what not and just use the command line. These things come and go.
It seems many distros are mostly just exercises in creating some theme for Gnome or whatever and imitating whatever the creator liked (Windows 95, Beos, Early versions of OSX, CDE, etc.). There's a few decades of nostalgia to pick from here.
Tahoe is tragically bad by almost every UX measure, and following various Apple subreddits i wonder if they just don't care anymore - since the majority of people are shocked by the amateurishness of both bugs and design choices in the latest update - this comes on top of literally every major bug being ignored from the alpha to releasing anyway then continuing to ignore feedback.
The UX group would present work to Steve J. every Thursday and Steve quickly passed judgement often harshly and without a lot of feedback, leading to even longer meetings afterward to try and determine course corrections. Steve J. and Bas were on the same wavelength and a lot of what Bas would show had been worked on directly with Steve before hand. Other things would be presented for the first time, and Steve could be pretty harsh. Don, Greg, Scott, Kevin would push back and get abused, but they took the abuse and could make in-roads.
Here is my snapshot of Stephen from the time. He presented the UI ideas for the intial tabbed window interface in Safari. He had multiple design ideas and Steve dismissed them quickly and harshly. Me recollection was that Steve said something like No, next, worse, next, even worse, next, no. Why don't you come back next week with something better. Stephen didn't push back, say much, just went ok and that was that. I think Greg was the team manager at the time and pushed Steve for more input and maybe got some. This was my general observation of how Stephen was over 20 years ago.
I am skeptical and doubtful about Stephen's ability to make a change unless he is facilitated greatly by someone else or has somehow changed drastically. The fact that he has been on the team while the general opinion of Apple UX quality has degraded to the current point of the Tahoe disaster is telling. Several team members paid dearly in emotional abuse under Steve and decided to leave rather than deal with the environment post Steve's death. Stephen is a SJ-era original and should have been able to push hard against what many of us perceive as very poor decisons. He either agreed with those decisions, or did not, and choose to go with the flow and enjoy the benefits of working at Apple. This is fine I guess. Many people are just fine going with the flow and not rocking the boat. It may be even easier when you have Apple-level comp and benefits.
My opinon; unless Stephen gets a very strong push from other forces, I don't see that he has the will or fortitude to make the changes that he himself has approved in one way or another. Who will push him? Tim Cook, Craig Federighi, Eddy Cue, Phil Schiller? The perceived mess of Tahoe happened on the watch of all of these Apple leaders.
I’m asking you to judge people’s state of mind here, which is near impossible, but please bear with me…
> Several team members paid dearly in emotional abuse under Steve and decided to leave rather than deal with the environment post Steve's death.
Normally during an event like this there is a change in culture as well which I think we have seen under Cook. So why did they assume that the abusive situation would continue? Jobs was generally known to be harsh to the point of abusive, but if the situation did not change on his death maybe the abuse was equal parts cultural rather than just from the CEO, so why not leave earlier?
Tim Cook has no taste and no sense of quality. He merely counts beans really well. Craig Federighi is responsible for the most precipitous drop in Apple's software quality since the late 80s and early 90s. Eddy Cue is responsible for some of Apple's worst software (music, iCloud, services), and Phil Schiller… what exactly does he do again?
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I think this is just what happens to companies as they get older. Most of the people who pioneered the Human Interface Guidelines aren't at the company anymore, and management doesn't see much financial growth in Mac sales compared to AI and services.
It's probably the services (Care, iCloud, Music, and even TV), Apple's AI isn't on the overall map at all compared to the competition.
https://github.com/RamonUnch/AltSnap
https://github.com/dmarcotte/easy-move-resize